“Harsh word, my dear Gray Phantom. As a whole, the experiments were highly successful. I discovered how to adjust the poison so as to produce death within a specified time. We were now ready to go ahead with the plan. Mr. Shei selected the victims, and I showed a number of his most trusted men how the poison was to be injected. Each of these, with an assistant, was assigned to one of the seven victims chosen by Mr. Shei, and the whole number of inoculations were successfully accomplished the other night. In a few days——”
“What about Miss Darrow?” inquired The Phantom brusquely. “What did you gain by murdering her?”
“Really, I wish you would drop that unpleasant word from your vocabulary. Miss Darrow had been unfortunate enough to learn certain facts which were detrimental to Mr. Shei. She had been watched constantly, and she was followed to the Thelma that night. Her actions were peculiar, and Mr. Shei’s agents suspected she was on the point of making embarrassing revelations. I was in New York at the time and happened to be within reach, so the agents communicated with me. I arrived just in time to prevent unpleasant consequences. In another moment she might have made some very damaging disclosures. In fact, she had already sent a peculiarly worded note to that remarkable person whose name eludes me.”
“Vincent Starr?” suggested The Phantom.
“Precisely. Mr. Starr is one of your highly temperamental geniuses. Just how much Miss Darrow had learned will never be known, but I thought it advisable to act promptly. The amount of poison I injected into her veins was carefully calculated to produce death within a few minutes.”
The Phantom mastered his sense of loathing. What he was learning might prove highly useful later on.
“Wouldn’t a knife thrust have been quicker and safer?” he suggested. “Even in the few minutes between the inoculation of the poison and Miss Darrow’s death she might have blurted out all she knew.”
“There was slight danger of that. The poison always blunts one’s mental faculties, especially when given in such a large dose. It was very unlikely that Miss Darrow would speak coherently in the brief interval while the poison acted. A quick thrust with a knife would perhaps have been safer, but we needed the moral effect.”
“The—what?”
The satisfied gleam in the doctor’s eyes testified that he was quite at ease once more, despite the cords that incapacitated him for action.